Christianity and the Roman

Empire
By Dr Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe
Last updated 2011-02-17

In the space of a few hundred years, a small, often brutally persecuted

cult rose to become the dominant religion of the West. How did it happen?

Beginnings of persecution

The story of Christianity’s rise to prominence is a remarkable one, but the traditional story of
its progression from a tiny, persecuted religion to the established religion in the medieval West
needs some debunking.

Although in the first few centuries AD Christians were prosecuted and punished, often with
death, there were also periods when they were more secure. Secondly, the rise of Christianity
to imperial-sponsored dominance in the fourth and fifth centuries, although surprising, was not
without precedent, and its spread hardly as inexorable as contemporary Christians portrayed
it.

Christians were first, and horribly, targeted for persecution as a group by the emperor Nero in
64 AD. A colossal fire broke out at Rome, and destroyed much of the city. Rumours abounded
that Nero himself was responsible. He certainly took advantage of the resulting devastation of
the city, building a lavish private palace on part of the site of the fire.

Perhaps to divert attention from the rumours, Nero ordered that Christians should be rounded
up and killed. Some were torn apart by dogs, others burnt alive as human torches.

Over the next hundred years or so, Christians were sporadically persecuted. It was not until
the mid-third century that emperors initiated intensive persecutions.

Reasons for persecution

Why were Christians persecuted? Much seems to have depended on local governors and how
zealously or not they pursued and prosecuted Christians. The reasons why individual Christians
were persecuted in this period were varied. In some cases they were perhaps scapegoats, their
faith attacked where more personal or local hostilities were at issue.

Contemporary pagan and Christian sources preserve other accusations levelled against the
Christians. These included charges of incest and cannibalism, probably resulting from garbled
accounts of the rites which Christians celebrated in necessary secrecy, being the agape (the
‘love-feast’) and the Eucharist (partaking of the body and blood of Christ).

Pagans were probably most suspicious of the Christian refusal to sacrifice to the Roman gods.
This was an insult to the gods and potentially endangered the empire which they deigned to
protect. Furthermore, the Christian refusal to offer sacrifices to the emperor, a semi-divine
monarch, had the whiff of both sacrilege and treason about it.

Thus the classic test of a Christian’s faith was to force him or her, on pain of death, to swear
by the emperor and offer incense to his images, or to sacrifice to the gods.

In the mid-second-century account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, officials begged Polycarp to

say ‘Caesar is Lord’, and to offer incense, to save his life. He refused. Later, in the arena, he
was asked by the governor to swear an oath by the ‘luck of Caesar’. He refused, and although
he was apparently eager to meet his death, beast-fighting had been declared closed for the
day and so he was burnt alive instead.

General persecutions tended to be sparked by particular events such as the fire at Rome under
Nero, or during periods of particular crisis, such as the third century. During the third century
the turn-over of emperors was rapid - many died violent deaths.

As well as this lack of stability at the head of the empire, social relations were in turmoil, and
barbarian incursions were on a threatening scale. The economy was suffering and inflation was
rampant. Pagans and Christians alike observed this unrest and looked for someone or
something, preferably subversive, to blame.

It was hardly surprising that a series of emperors ordered savage empire-wide persecutions of
the Christians.

Toleration?

Although fourth and fifth century AD Christian narratives tend to

describe the preceding centuries bitterly as a period of sustained
and vicious persecution, there were in fact lulls.

Bacchic revelry scene from the Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii, Italy ©
How can we explain this? Well, the Roman empire was in the first
few centuries AD expansionist and in its conquests accommodated new cults and philosophies
from different cultures, such as the Persian cult of Mithraism, the Egyptian cult of Isis and
Neoplatonism, a Greek philosophical religion.

Paganism was never, then, a unified, single religion, but a fluid and amorphous collection. But
it would also be a mistake to describe Roman religion as an easy, tolerant co-existence of
cults. ‘Toleration’ is a distinctly modern, secular idea.
The very history of Christianity and Judaism in the empire demonstrates that there were limits
to how accommodating Roman religion could be, and these were not the only cults to be
singled out for persecution.

The cults of Bacchus and of Magna Mater had also been suppressed - by the Roman senate
during the Republic, mainly because their behaviour was louche and ‘un-Roman’. Bacchic
revels encouraged ecstatic drunkenness and violence, and the cult of Magna Mater involved
outlandish dancing and music, and was served by self-castrating priests.

Under particular emperors, Christians were less liable to be punished for the mere fact of being
Christians – or indeed, for ever having been Christian. Thus under Trajan, it was agreed that
although admitting to Christian faith was an offence, ex-Christians should not be prosecuted.

Constantine’s ‘conversion’

Gigantic head of Constantine in the Capitoline Museum ©

One of the supposed watersheds in history is the ‘conversion’ of the
emperor Constantine to Christianity in, or about, 312 AD. Historians
have marvelled at this idea.

Emperors had historically been hostile or indifferent to Christianity. How

could an emperor subscribe to a faith which involved the worship of
Jesus Christ - an executed Jewish criminal? This faith was also popular
among slaves and soldiers, hardly the respectable orders in society.

The story of Constantine’s conversion has acquired a miraculous quality,

which is unsurprising from the point of view of contemporary Christians. They had just
emerged from the so-called ‘Great Persecution’ under the emperor Diocletian at the end of the
third century.

The moment of Constantine’s conversion was tied by two Christian narrators to a military
campaign against a political rival, Maxentius. The conversion was the result of either a vision
or a dream in which Christ directed him to fight under Christian standards, and his victory
apparently assured Constantine in his faith in a new god.

Constantine’s ‘conversion’ poses problems for the historian. Although he immediately declared
that Christians and pagans should be allowed to worship freely, and restored property
confiscated during persecutions and other lost privileges to the Christians, these measures did
not mark a complete shift to a Christian style of rule.

Many of his actions seemed resolutely pagan. Constantine founded a new city named after
himself: Constantinople. Christian writers played up the idea that this was to be a 'new Rome',
a fitting Christian capital for a newly Christian empire.
But they had to find ways to explain the embarrassing fact that in this new, supposedly
Christian city, Constantine had erected pagan temples and statues.

How should we characterise Constantine’s religious convictions? The differing but related
accounts of his miraculous conversion suggest some basic spiritual experience which he
interpreted as related to Christianity.

His understanding of Christianity was, at the stage of his conversion, unsophisticated. He may
not have understood the implications of converting to a religion which expected its members to
devote themselves exclusively to it.

However, what was certainly established by the early fourth century was the phenomenon of
an emperor adopting and favouring a particular cult. What was different about Constantine’s
‘conversion’ was merely the particular cult to which he turned – the Christ-cult – where
previous emperors had sought the support of pagan gods and heroes from Jove to Hercules.

The ‘triumph’ of Christianity?

Contemporary Christians treated Constantine’s conversion as a decisive moment of victory in a

cosmic battle between good and evil, even as the end of history, but it was far from that.

Christianity did increase in numbers gradually over the next two centuries, and among
Constantine’s successors only one, the emperor Julian in the 360s AD, mounted concerted
action to re-instate paganism as the dominant religion in the empire.

But there was no ‘triumph’, no one moment where Christians had visibly ‘won’ some battle
against pagans. Progress was bitty, hesitant, geographically patchy.

Christianity offered spiritual comfort and the prospect of salvation on the one hand, and
attractive new career paths and even riches as a worldly bishop on the other. But plenty of
pagans, both aristocrats based in the large cities of the empire and rural folk, remained
staunch in their adherence to an old faith.

Some hundred years after Constantine’s ‘conversion’, Christianity seemed to be entrenched as

the established religion, sponsored by emperors and protected in law. But this did not mean
that paganism had disappeared.

Indeed, when pagans blamed Christian impiety (meaning negligence of the old gods) for the
barbarian sack of Rome in 410 AD, one of the foremost Christian intellectuals of the time,
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, regarded the charge as serious enough to warrant lengthy reply in
his mammoth book 'The City of God'.

Paganism may have been effectively eclipsed as an imperial religion, but it continued to pose a
powerful political and religious challenge to the Christian church.
Books

Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire by Peter Brown (University
of Wisconsin Press, 1992)

Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World by Peter Brown
(Cambridge, 1995)

The Early Church Henry Chadwick (London, 1967)

Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: a Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to
Donatus by William Frend (Oxford, 1965)

Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the
Conversion of Constantine by Robin Lane Fox (London, 1986)

The End of Ancient Christianity by Robert Markus (Cambridge, 1990)

About the author

Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe is a Lecturer in Roman History at King's College, London. Her research
interests include

Source:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/christianityromanempire_article_01.shtml